Texas man charged in federal court with human smuggling to south Lee

FORT MYERS - Driving north on Interstate 75 close to midnight in late May, Luis Sifuentes-Botello had a gold charm dangling from his neck, a 20-year-old woman by his side, and a man in the back seat whose name he didn’t know.

A Lee County deputy noticed that the Texas license plate on the gray Chevrolet Suburban wasn’t illuminated. A traffic stop near the Corkscrew Road exit followed.

Until this week, the state had charges of human smuggling and traffic infractions against Sifuentes-Botello, 45. Federal agents escalated that this week, filing a charge of transporting an illegal alien for profit.

A smuggler named “Chino” in Texas was paying him $100 a person to deliver 10 people to Florida, he told investigators, according to court documents. Half the money was up front. The car was borrowed from the smuggler, or coyote.

If convicted in federal court, Sifuentes-Botello faces 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine for a $1,000 job.

When Lee County deputies made the traffic stop, they found out more while asking questions about the man in the back seat of Sifuentes-Botello’s vehicle.

Three days earlier, 39-year-old Marcelino Mateo Perez had left the southern Mexican state of Chiapas for the Texas border. It took a few days in the woods and $500 to get into the U.S. without authorization, he told an investigator. At a Houston gas station, he offered Sifuentes-Botello another $200 to get him to his family in Bonita Springs.

First, there were stops at gas stations and fast food joints in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia to deliver people to their waiting families, according to an affidavit filed by a U.S. Department of Homeland Security special agent in a Fort Myers federal court this week.

By the night of May 29, having made the second-to-last drop — three people at a McDonald’s restaurant in Jupiter on Florida’s east coast — Sifuentes-Botello, a woman who would claim to be his wife, and Perez headed to Southwest Florida.

When the Lee deputy stopped Sifuentes-Botello, he showed a Mexican driver’s license, lied about his age, and appeared nervous, according to an affidavit filed in federal court records.

They were driving back from Jupiter because his friend — whose name Sifuentes-Botello couldn’t provide — in the back seat didn’t find work and wanted to go back to Texas, he told the deputy.

His wife, Alma Saucedo, said the couple was looking for work in Bonita Springs. She had $4,600 cash in her purse — roughly what Perez paid, plus half the money up front from the smuggler in Texas, and several thousand dollars from a family when their relative was delivered, according to figures in the affidavit.

The state charges of driving without a valid license and giving false information to police were dropped once the federal case was filed Tuesday.

Sifuentes-Botello lives in Texas, but is originally from Mexico. Unlike Perez, he is a lawful permanent resident, but if convicted, could face deportation. The father of six remains in federal custody, awaiting a hearing Monday to determine if he will remain in detention.

With a criminal rap sheet in several southeastern states, a wife in Louisiana, and ties to Texas and Mexico, prosecutors will argue Sifuentes-Botello is too great a flight risk to release on bond.

In a similar interstate stop last July, Armando Valdes-Rodriguez of Miami was pulled over by a Collier deputy with six people in a red Dodge van. The human smuggling charges — one for each undocumented immigrant in the vehicle, including a 13-year-old-boy — were dropped by prosecutors after a motion to quash information in the case, according to State Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Samantha Syoen.

The prosecutors’ case also was thwarted when they couldn’t find several of the supposed victims to testify.